By Alexander Pigounis
Dewey looked down at the papers. Their eggshell whiteness made his stomach swirl. Mathematical problems. Questions of engineering. All so specific, so pinpointed. It was the pigeonhole, he knew it—so blatantly clear to see, not an ounce of shame in its presence.
Dewey’s mind couldn’t help but stray to photography, the only thing that ever seemed to provide him any joy. He closed his eyes and images formed—a monk wreathed in flame, Earth drifting in the dark, a girl with jade stone eyes, a man falling from a tower. He had yet to write a single word. His hands began to shake.
Hanging his head back provided no solace, the beige popcorn walls looming with their ugly oppression. Bubbles rose in his throat and sweat took to his palms. Hundreds of pencils echoed a scrawling cacophony that rode along the resiny smell of linoleum flooring. He felt drowned in the stink, like it was slowly crawling down his throat and there was nothing he could do about it.
His gaze fell to the test again. This is it, Dewey thought, the moment to end all moments. Once this was done, everything would be set in stone. Sealed like an ancient Greek fate.
Is it better to resist, to cry and lash out? Or is it really true that a man meets his fate on the path taken to avoid it? Stability or freedom. Respect or self-fulfilment. Wealth or happiness. Which was most important? Why, he wondered—and he nearly sobbed right then and there in the exam room before all his peers—Why must it be this way? Why can’t I just do what I want?
He found himself stumbling out of his chair, knocking it over and almost sending the desk with it. Hundreds of heads turned, a sea of cue ball eyes goggling like they’d never seen him before. But they had. They’d grown up with him for years. Now he doubted if they’d ever really known him at all.
The synthetic at the end of the room locked eyes with him. Not eyes, he realised, just marbles with man-made irises, encased in a mass-produced nanocrystal skull.
‘Is there an issue, Mr Bowen?’
Dewey scoffed at the question. Too many issues to count.
‘You okay, Dew?’ a friend asked. ‘You don’t look well.’
‘If you are ill, Mr Bowen, you may go to the nurse’s office. If not, sit back down. You’re disrupting the exam.’
Dewey pulled at the collar of his shirt and wolfed down breaths like they were the last he’d ever get. Above, fluorescent lights burned blots into his vision, while the linoleum stench seemed to spread and enrichen. Everything was suffocating him, even his own skin. He needed to get out.
‘I’m not ill… and I’m not sitting back down.’
The synthetic half-blinked and processed his response. ‘Pardon?’
‘You heard me, you dead-eyed bastard. I won’t… I won’t let this happen.’
He felt all the eyes on him, the weight of every thought that said Jesus, Dewey’s really gone off the deep end. He’d hoped to be numb to it by this point, yet the opposite had happened; the humiliation stung tenfold. But that wasn’t important now. There was no going back. Escape was all that mattered.
‘Sit down, Mr Bowen.’ Its face did not match its words, like a ventriloquist’s doll. Dewey noticed it now. Once you know a trick, you see through it so easily, as if it wasn’t convincing in the first place.
‘I ‘spose you’re all okay with this,’ Dewey raved at his fellow students. ‘Letting these fucking synthies decide what’s best for us?’ He stormed forward until he stood just before the synthetic’s nose, so close he could smell the silicone skin.
His best friend Reese spoke up, embarrassed to be associated with him. ‘You gone mad, Dew? Step back from Mr Chapman before you get us all in trouble!’
Dewey repeated the name under his breath. Mr Chapman. A small laugh left him. It was the first time he’d found something funny in God-knows-how-long. ‘Mr Chapman here… is made of gel. He’s no teacher. No person. My life will not be determined by a sculpture. Not anymore!’
Knuckles whitened as Dewey balled his fist and raised it. He’d almost fully committed to the swing when he saw the look on Chapman’s face. He’d winced, no different than anyone would, fear flickered over his windowpane eyes. Surely a programmed response, but it made Dewey think. Fear is programmed into us all, human or otherwise. Was this any different?
The boy fell back a step and dropped his fist. Chapman’s chest wavered with shaky breaths, which Dewey found peculiar. Why had he been made to breathe when he had no lungs?
Suddenly, Dewey felt adrenaline flood his veins, rallying with it the whole-body tingle of panic. Like a lost child, he gazed around the room full of students, all straddling the edges of their seats because they never got to witness such riveting events. He studied the columns of them; a menagerie of different faces united by one mutual expression—shock.
Then, a beautiful thought hit Dewey, that freedom and self-integrity are not binary opposites. Perhaps it was possible for him to escape without losing himself. Stirred by this newfound hope, Dewey began to run, and he did not look back.
Dewey recalled when he’d first discovered the pigeonhole back in early March; submerged in the light of his computer screen, restless in the dead of night, thinking what if? At the time, it didn’t worry him nearly as much. He felt insane for even considering it. But as he watched tests become progressively more specific and he began to pick apart every word the synthie teachers said, he knew it to be true.
He had not kept it secret for even a day. He told others immediately. First Reese, who told him to come off it and gave his shoulder a punch, and it hurt as it always did. Reese saw no problem with it regardless, even if Dew would rather die than be anything but a photographer. Then Dewey told his little sisters Marilyn and June, who didn’t understand what he was talking about, just as they never did.
‘They’re trying to make me some kind of engineer,’ he rambled to the twins. ‘A hospital technician… Me!’ They merely shrugged as if to say, so what?
Most interesting was his mother. She didn’t reply with words, just shook her head and turned away. But by how she’d blinked, Dewey knew something was amiss. There was a delay in her eyes, a subtle dread.
For weeks after, the question tormented him. Why did she blink that way? Was it pain? Guilt? Despair? In sheer desperation, Dewey soon called up the only person he trusted more than himself: his auntie. He hadn’t even gotten through the second sentence of his tirade when she stopped him.
‘What do you love?’ she’d asked him. She already knew the answer, but she was trying to make a point.
‘Taking pictures,’ he said, and he could hear her smiling through the phone.
‘Then do that, Dewey boy. And damn the rest.’
Auntie Cat was right, as always. But Dewey feared it wasn’t so simple this time. She assured him it could be if only he’d let it.
Dewey asked how her painting was going, a topic he always jumped at. She said it was going. Dewey could relate. His photography was never anything near smooth sailing. It felt more like drowning. Like water had filled his lungs and snuffed his breath and left the forlorn thought of why am I even trying to swim? Cat told him that’s what it is to be an artist, that it’s a beautiful suffering only a special few can bear. Dewey felt his suffering was anything but beautiful, even when his auntie said she knew he was one of those few.
But now, as Dewey barrelled down the halls of the school he’d long known, something did feel really quite beautiful. It was hard for him to pinpoint what exactly. It couldn’t be the rows of lockers and their swathes of dull redness, and it certainly couldn’t be that dreadful screech of the linoleum against his sneakers. Dewey realised it wasn’t something he could see or hear; it was something beyond the physical.
Somewhere in Dewey’s hippocampus, this realisation broke down a dam and gave way to a synapse light show of a hundred thousand memories, a mushroom cloud of thought strong enough to leave a tickle at his scalp. They were a jumble of echoes from all different years and, whether Dewey wanted them to or not, they were coming back to him now like moths to a flame.
Dewey remembered the old Ford Focus his stepfather Bruce had gifted him on his 16th birthday, he remembered the look on Bruce’s face when he told him driving wasn’t his thing, and he remembered how his mother told him not to be rude and to drive it anyway.
He remembered when he’d met Reese on the third day of first year, he remembered how much it hurt when Reese first punched him, and he remembered when Reese called him gay for liking photography.
He remembered when Mrs Gower had looked at his photograph of the street where he lived, the one that took a month for him to get right, he remembered when she sneered with her mulberry lips, and he remembered when she’d said that his photos had no soul to them, the same goddamn thing everyone else said.
What Dewey found most fascinating, however, was that these memories weren’t what felt beautiful. They felt horrible. Rather, it was the reduction of them that felt so magnificent. It was the profound understanding, only possible through his sprint down the halls, that they didn’t matter at all, that they didn’t have to mean anything unless he wanted them to. So, now he was left with the task of choosing which memories to save.
He would save the time when he was ten years old and Auntie Cat first showed him one of her paintings, he’d save its lovely greens and oranges and how it looked as if it were moving, and he’d even save how he cried and Auntie Cat had to wipe up the tears with a napkin.
He would save the birth of his sisters, he’d save their tiny hands and stupid heads, and he’d save all their dances in the backyard and every stop-motion film he’d made with their Barbie dolls to screen for them in the living room.
And above all, no matter how much he tried to forget it, he’d save the sadness of that hospital room, how his dad’s coughs echoed around it, he’d save the acrid stink of its linoleum floors, and he’d save the moment he’d left to piss and his dad said ‘Don’t fall in, kiddo’—the last stupid thing he’d ever say.
As Dewey ran, he sounded out his father’s final words. They felt different now. They rang clearer and louder, and he’d forgotten how the coughing sounded. Don’t fall in, kiddo. They felt strangely appropriate. Dewey thought to himself, Okay, Dad. I won’t.
At this point, Dewey had reached the front doors of the main building. He charged through them and the evening wind sunk its freezing teeth into his face. He was fully awake now. Even with all cognitive functions operational, his mind stayed made up.
Dewey began down the winding path to the entrance gate, as fast as his legs could take him, and his mind conjured images—a monk wreathed in flame, Earth drifting in the dark, a girl with jade stone eyes, a man falling from a tower. He felt a smile on his face.
As he reached the gate, Dewey decided not to open it. For whatever reason, there was a strong desire to climb it. Hands to the bars, fingers interlocked over cold metal, Dewey began to ascend, and he thought of his auntie. He thought of her painting that made him cry, he thought of when she said he was special, he thought of all the memories he’d save, and he thought of how excited he was to show her what he’d photograph next.